Babbling about books and plants.

Tower-Climbing Adventures

I have mentioned before that I’m in a historical dance group. We mostly dance for the fun of it – we’re called Gaudeamus, after all, which means Let Us Rejoice – but sometimes, we get invited to dance at medieval fairs. Today, we were invited to dance at a castle ruin called Spilberg. It’s not usually open to the public, but sometimes (like today) they open it for fundraisers to get some money to keep the castle from collapsing completely. So even though it was 35° C and going swimming was rather tempting, we put on our garb and danced for a good cause (and free food and drink).

They’ve already done a lot of work since I was there for the first time last year, but I didn’t have my camera with me then, so I can’t show you any pictures to compare.

The new entrance (the original one is on the other side, and that was the one we took, since we had a little cart with blankets, food and CD player that we couldn’t very well take up the stairs.)

The well. There was a large larch tree growning close to it, and when they cut that down, they used the wood to surround the well.

Looking up at the tower… seen like this, it doesn’t even feel all that tall!

The first floor in the tower, already well restored. According to a guy we talked to, the hooks in the ceiling had large waterskins hanging from them, as a sort of medieval fire sprinkler system.

The next floor, after climbing up a narrow staircase.

Looking out the window.

We’re not quite sure what this was, or why it was there… the body looks like it might have belonged to a duck, but the head’s definitely not a bird head.

Last September, there was a pile of rubble in this space, which must once have been the staircase. We climbed up over the pile to reach the next floor. Now, they’ve cleared the rubble away, and instead, there was this:

Um. That’s a little intimidating.

But we climbed up – two floors on this ladder, and then another one on another ladder.

Well this looks like a lot of fun…

The silly thing is, as a child, I balanced on much narrower, less sturdy things in a similar height, and I don’t remember being particularly scared. And now these quite stable boards felt terrifying! But I made it across.

The view from the window.

While you’re up there, the tower feels much higher than it seemed from the ground!

A long way down…

We could have gone up another level – can’t really call it a floor any more since there wasn’t one, just a narrow ledge along the wall) – but we decided we weren’t dressed for that, both of us in sandals and me in a dress (which I’d already knotted between my legs, otherwise it would have been even more inconvenient for climbing in.

The last bit of the way down (between the completely restored room and the “skeleton room”). Makes you appreciate modern stairs where all the steps are the same height.

This was at the end of the event, when most of the people had left. It was quite crowded earlier, and noisy, and to be honest, rather exhausting for introvert me.

A tiny little reenactors’s camp. (I’ve been invited to stay with them if I ever want to camp at a fair. It’s a tempting idea, but on the other hand, I’m still rather nervous around new people and new situations, and I’m already far busier than I want to be.)